Women Filmmakers In Contemporary Hindi Cinema

This book is a comprehensive anthology comprising essays on women film directors, producers and screenwriters from Bollywood, or the popular Hindi film industry. It derives from the major theories of modernity, postmodern feminism, semiotics, cultural production, and gender performativity in globalized times. The collection transcends the traditional approaches of looking at films made by women filmmakers as ‘feminist’ cinema, and focuses on an extraordinary group of women filmmakers like Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, Bhavani Iyer, Farah Khan, Mira Nair Vijaya Mehta, and Zoya Akthar. The volume will be of interest to academics and theorists of gender and Hindi cinema, as well as anybody interested in contemporary Hindi films in their various manifestations.

These efforts have been enabled by the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy since 1991.

What does it mean to be a woman filmmaker in India? One famous director suffered from depression, unable to take on film projects because of her young child. Another was asked in an interview if she drinks and smokes to deal with the stress of filmmaking like men do. Some faced cinematographers who refused to listen to them. Almost all of them struggle to raise money for films with female protagonists. But they are also cool and sassy. One attended film-school with her two-week-old baby. Another stormed the once all-male bastion of the 200-crore club. They can make a hit film about a middle-aged housewife, as much as a bisexual teenager with a disability. F-rated brings together diverse stories of eleven women filmmakers in India: Aparna Sen, Mira Nair, Farah Khan, Meghna Gulzar, Nandita Das, Shonali Bose, Tanuja Chandra, Anjali Menon, Reema Kagti, Kiran Rao and Alankrita Srivastava. A celebration of their womanhood as much as their work - this is a must-read.

In this book, film scholars, anthropologists, and critics discuss star-making in the contemporary Hindi-language film industry in India, also known as “Bollywood.” Drawing on theories of stardom, globalization, transnationalism, gender, and new media studies, the chapters explore contemporary Hindi film celebrity. With the rise of social media and India’s increased engagement in the global economy, Hindi film stars are forging their identities not just through their on-screen images and magazine and advertising appearances, but also through an array of media platforms, product endorsements, setting fashion trends, and involvement in social causes. Focusing on some of the best-known Indian stars since the late 1990s, the book discusses the multiplying avenues for forging a star identity, the strategies industry outsiders adopt to become stars, and the contradictions and conflicts that such star-making produces. It addresses questions such as: What traits of contemporary stars have contributed most to longevity and success in the industry? How has filmmaking technology and practice altered the nature of stardom? How has the manufacture of celebrity altered with the recent appearance of commodity culture in India and the rise of a hyper-connected global economy? By doing so, it describes a distinct moment in India and in the world in which stars and stardom are drawn more closely than ever into the vital events of global culture. Hindi films and their stars are part of the national and global entertainment circuits that are bigger and more competitive than ever. As such, this is a timely book creates opportunities for examining stardom in other industries and provides fruitful cross-cultural perspectives on star identities today. "Grounded in rigorous scholarship as well as a palpable love of Hindi cinema, this collection of 19 essays on a dizzying array of contemporary Hindi film stars makes for an informative, thought-provoking, illuminating, and most of all, a joyful read. Pushing boundaries of not only global Star Studies but also film theory as a whole, this de-colonised and de-colonising volume is a must read for film scholars, students and cinephiles!" Dr. Sunny Singh, Senior Lecturer - Creative Writing and English Literature, Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture & Design, London Metropolitan University “A wide-ranging overview of Hindi cinema’s filmi firmament today, focussing on its most intriguing and brightest-burning stars. The variety of approaches to stardom and celebrity by both established and upcoming scholars reveals a web of interconnecting stories and concerns that provide fascinating new insights into the workings of today's Hindi film industry, while shining fresh light on contemporary India and the world we live in.” Professor Rosie Thomas, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), College of Design, Creative and Digital Industries, University of Westminster

This book analyses the role of women in the films of one of the leading filmmakers of the ‘Third World’ in the 1950s, Satyajit Ray, a national icon in filmmaking in India. The book explores the portrayal of women in the context of the creation of national culture after India became independent. Gender issues were very important to India under Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s – with the enactment of inheritance and divorce laws. Ray’s portrayal of women and his films anticipate much of the theorizing of later-day feminism. This book analyses cinematic texts with special reference to the women characters using feminist film theory and representation along with a study of the socio-political and economic conditions pertinent to the times – both relevant to the film’s making and its setting. The primary texts studied are films spanning over four decades from Pather Panchali (1955) to his last trilogy and are based on a categorization of the broad feminine ‘types’ represented in the films – based on the socio-political situations in which they are placed – and their relationships with the other characters present. Ray’s portrayal of women has an enormous bearing on our understanding of how modern India evolved in the Nehru era and after, and this book explore just that: the place of the woman as it is and should be in a young nation encumbered by patriarchy. Gendered Modernity and Indian Cinema will be of interest to academics in the field of World cinema, Indian and Bengali cinema, Film Studies as well as Gender Studies and South Asian culture and society.

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

This book presents a feminist mapping of the articulation and suppression of female desire in Hindi films, which comprise one of modern India’s most popular cultural narratives. It explores the lineament of evil and the corresponding closure of chastisement or domesticity that appear as necessary conditions for the representation of subversive female desire. The term ‘bad’ is used heuristically, and not as a moral or essential category, to examine some of the iconic disruptive women of Hindi cinema and to uncover the nexus between patriarchy and other hierarchies, such as class, caste and religion in these representations. The twenty-one essays examine the politics of female desire/s from the 1930s to the present day - both through in-depth analyses of single films and by tracing the typologies in multiple films. The essays are divided into five sections indicating the various gendered desires and rebellions that patriarchal society seeks to police, silence and domesticate.

These are interesting times in the history of Indian cinema, particularly because the established aesthetic conventions and modes of production of the Hindi film industry are being challenged, as are the boundaries between what is alternative and what is mainstream. This book is an attempt to contextualize the upsurge in this form of cinema in Bollywood/Hindi film industry. It also aims to promote an academic enquiry into the works of these filmmakers, their religious beliefs, social moorings, cinematic influences, attitudes towards filmmaking and experiences of making movies. It will be an important reading for serious students of South Asian studies, film studies and media studies as well as the general reader who has an interest in cinema.

A framework for understanding the distinctiveness of Indian cinema as a national cinema within a global context dominated by Hollywood is proposed by this book. With its sudden explosions into song-and-dance sequences, half-time intermissions and heavy traces of censorship, Indian cinema can be identified as a 'Cinema of Interruptions'. To the uninitiated viewer, brought up on the seamless linear plotting of Hollywood narrative, this unfamiliar tendency towards digression may appear random and superfluous, yet this book argues that such devices assist in the construction of a distinct visual and narrative time-space. In the hands of imaginative directors, the conventions of Indian cinema become opportunities for narrative play and personal expression in such films as 'Sholay' (1975), 'Nayakan' (1987), 'Parinda' (1989), 'Hathyar' (1981) and 'Hey Ram!' (1999). 'Cinema of Interruptions' places commercial Indian film within a global system of popular cinemas, but also points out its engagement with the dominant genre principles implemented by Western film. By focusing on the action-genre work of leading contemporary directors J.P. Dutta, Mani Ratnam, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, brazen national style is shown to interact with international genre films to produce a hybrid form that reworks the gangster film, the western and the avenging woman genre. Central to this study is the relationship Indian cinema shares with its audience, and an understanding of the pleasures it offers the cinephile. In articulating this bond the book presents not only a fresh framework for understanding popular Indian cinema but also a contribution to film genre studies.